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Selling To Your MySpace “Friends”
The New York Times ponders the question: is having a lot of friends on MySpace better than having a record deal? Tila Tequila, who has 1.7 million "friends" on the News Corp.-owned site is about to find out. Her new single “I Love U,” produced by the rapper Lil Jon, will be released on iTunes tomorrow. Ms. Tequila, a onetime model for Playboy.com rejected offers from record companies and is hoping that her MySpace …
The Horror of Coke
Complete Washroom Solutions makes fun of fashionable coke waifs, while selling a sanitary solution. Talk about squeaky clean... …
That’s Entertainment
The New York Times "Sunday Styles" section looks at a disturbing development, or excellent business opportunity, depending on one's point-of-view regarding consumerism and celebrity worship. Screens big and small are already full of recognizable brands like Coke and Cheerios placed in strategic view, a practice known as explicit product placement. But, until recently, viewers had to work at identifying the shoes or …
Starbucks Searches Its Soul
The Wall Street Journal (paid sub. req.) has published an email sent by Starbucks' CEO, Howard Schultz, revealing his inner turmoil over decisions made under his watch. It's unusual to see a man in his position question this deeply. His email, titled, "The Commoditization of the Starbucks Experience" looks at what Schultz calls "the watering down of the Starbucks experience." For example, when we went to automatic …
Then We Came To The End: An All-Too-Real Novel
I have a backlog of books I've been wanting to read, so I'll add this one to the list: Then We Came To The End: A Novel by Joshua Ferris, a former Chicago copywriter, is described as this: In this wildly funny debut from former ad man Ferris, a group of copywriters and designers at a Chicago ad agency face layoffs at the end of the '90s boom. Indignation rises over the rightful owner of a particularly coveted chair …
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The Art of Work
I enjoy creative nonfiction that explores the work we choose to do and the various conflicts therein. Scott Partee works for the U.N. in Vienna. Here's how he describes it: I just finished crawling around in a rat hole while wearing a suit to lay down some network infrastructure for some highly confidential nuclear nonproliferation air-gapped ta-do da whooptiewhitz. Now, that's making geekery sound fine. No easy …
Did The USA Today Ad Meter Cause CareerBuilder’s Review?
Here's an interesting bit from Ad Age about Cramer-Krasselt's loss of the CareerBuilder account: In an internal memo issued today, the agency's president, Peter Krivkovich, said CareerBuilder put its account up for review after the agency's Super Bowl ads failed to rank in the top 10 in USA Today's viewer poll. "To our amazement, to our total astonishment, all that astounding business success was less important than …
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